


The Care and Feeding of a Badass

by FlyingPigPoet



Series: Before the Girl Took Flight [1]
Category: Supergirl (TV 2015)
Genre: F/F, Pre-Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-29
Updated: 2017-05-30
Packaged: 2018-11-06 15:02:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 4,272
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11038596
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FlyingPigPoet/pseuds/FlyingPigPoet
Summary: Alex was recruited to the DEO. Then someone had to train her. Luckily for Susan Vasquez, that someone was her.





	1. New Recruit #1

It was an ordinary Monday morning for DEO Agent Susan Vasquez: out of bed at five a.m., sit-ups, push-ups, chin-ups, and a two-mile run before the Nevada heat became unbearable. Then she was showering, throwing on her black tacticals, strapping her Glock to her thigh and riding her motorcycle to work in the underground bunker of a secret government black site.

Ordinary was relative, after all.

By seven (and it had taken her years to stop thinking in military time), she was seated in the command center with a USMC mug of crappy coffee. On her tablet, she had her notes about the escaped prisoners, but she'd need more intel on them before she could posit scenarios. Once more she sent a secure email to her informant in Metropolis, but she didn't expect much. She had gotten into obscure top-secret sites before through persuasion, guild and ninja-level stealth, but some sites were more obscure and more top secret than others.

"Agent Vasquez! Can I see you in my office?"

Director Hank Henshaw's deep voice had nuances in it. While the statement was not exactly a question, it also included... a certain curiosity, she thought. She strode into his office to find him wearing his "FBI" suit and tie, and looking very Black compared to the extreme paleness of the young woman sitting in front of his desk. As Vasquez eyed the woman, she couldn't decide if the pallor was more due to genetics or, perhaps, a hangover. She was dressed in tight black jeans and four-inch fuck-me heels. Her long black hair looked like she'd just crawled out of bed and her mascara was smeared under her eyes.

With a touch of annoyance, Vasquez said to the girl, "Rough night?"

Henshaw said, "Agent Vasquez, I'd like you to meet our new recruit, Alexandra Danvers."

Quiet and wincing, the woman said, "Just Alex is fine."

"We usually go by last names here," said Vasquez. 

Danvers nodded glumly.

Vasquez cocked a questioning eyebrow at Henshaw.

"Agent Vasquez, you will be in charge of her training. With breaks for other... eventualities, of course."

Danvers looked confused.

"Alien attacks," Vasquez translated. "Have you ever interacted with aliens, Danvers?"

The woman's eyes went blank. "Not that I know of."

And that was a very interesting response, thought Vasquez. Most new recruits either went goggle-eyed and rushed to describe their close encounter or they looked bitter and showed the scars. Denial was uncommon enough to be astronomically impossible. In her head, Vasquez started a new file, labeled: Danvers, Alex. Risk Factor: ?

//

A lot of things could happen to a person to cause the DEO to recruit them. Usually it was a combination of an extraordinary education or skillset and a traumatic interaction with aliens. Vasquez had gained the former in her first tour in Iraq and the latter in her second. That's also where she got the scars on her thigh that looked unsurprisingly like clawmarks.

Good reason for that.

Director Henshaw had flown to the Landstuhl Military Hospital in Germany to talk to her between the surgeries about the possibility of using her training in combat and threat assessment to help protect the humans from alien attacks. At first she had said that she was done with predicting terror attacks, but then Henshaw had pointed out that predicting human behavior, particularly that based on human ideologies, was easy, that maybe Vasquez and her unit had been taken by surprise because they had been, well, not sloppy but jaded, preparing for what they had seen a thousand times rather than for what they were seeing in the moment. And he had shown her photographs of the evidence--tracks, spore, scat--that nothing human had made. And Vasquez hadn't looked, hadn't known to look.

"Can you teach me?" she'd asked him fiercely.

"Yes, I can."

//

On Tuesday, Vasquez had taken Danvers down to Rick in HR to get the paperwork done.

"How are they hangin', Rick?" Vasquez asked with a grin.

The balding old man snorted. "Great, not that you'd care, Sue." He pulled out forms in triplicate and handed them to Danvers with a ballpoint pen.

She stared at him. "Paper? Seriously? It's the twenty-first century."

Rick shook his head. "Paper can't be hacked."

Vasquez gestured to the paper calendar with rescue dogs on it and the first eight days crossed off with thick black marker. "How many days left?"

"Four hundred thirty-five, Susie."

"Call me Susie again, Rick, and you'll retire tomorrow in a wheelchair."

"Whatever you say, Agent Vasquez, Ma'am."

As they left his office, Danvers asked, "Where are we going? And you said everybody goes by last names."

"Field agents do, not administrative staff. And we're going to put you through a diagnostic."

The woman's hunched shoulders relaxed. "Oh, well, that's all right. I test well."

Vasquez smiled and led her into the combat room. "Welcome, Danvers, to the Green Octagon of Eternal Agony. You will be spending a lot of time here with me this year and you will, I promise you, learn to love it."


	2. New Recruit #2

Alex Danvers had played soccer and rugby in high school. Her body had been tough once, before her need for perfection led her to speed through first her undergraduate degrees and then her MD/PhD program. And although her extreme partying had put her on academic probation, the deal Henshaw had made with Stanford would allow her to take a leave of absence while conducting original research with the "FBI," which she could present in a dissertation at the end of the year. And the DEO lab facilities were amazing. Sure, it had meant moving from Palo Alto to the middle of nowhere in the desert, but beggars couldn't be choosers.

What she hadn't been expecting was the first step in her training to be a fistfight. Vasquez showed her how to put on the body armor, mouth-guard, helmet and grappling gloves, and then just said, "Come at me."

They traded punches and Alex's always just failed to land, and several times Vasquez threw her over her shoulder and then went over how better to land without hurting herself. Alex managed to get a kick in, but by that time she was panting.

"Break?" said Vasquez.

Alex nodded breathlessly. They took off their helmets and Vasquez pulled out two water bottles. "Hydrating is important, Danvers."

"I know."

"Okay, we need to talk about etiquette. When a superior officer speaks to you, you reply, 'Yes, Ma'am or Sir' or 'No, Ma'am,' as the case may be."

Alex rolled her eyes. "Yes, Ma'am."

"We'll work on it." She set down her bottle and put in her mouth guard. "Leave the helmet.

Alex put in her mouth guard and joined the woman in the ring. They circled each other and Alex jabbed, but Vasquez just ducked out of the way, saying, "In real combat, don't jab. This isn't a couple of little boys boxing in front of an audience. This is life or death. Put everything behind every attack you make."

Before she had finished speaking, Alex had charged her with a rugby tackle, slamming her up against the wall, but then Vasquez shifted sideways and grabbed by the hair pulling her down and flipping over her shoulder to fall face-first to the floor.

She blinked, dazed, saw a spattering of her own blood on the black floor.

"Much better," said Vasquez, above her. "Go down to medical to get that set and take the afternoon off. I'll see you here at oh-seven-- I mean, at seven a.m. tomorrow."

And she left Alex gingerly feeling her broken nose.

Of course, the convenient thing about being covered with your own blood in a maze-like underground government facility was that you didn't need to ask for directions to medical. Agents just pointed, shaking their heads.

And the medic who greeted her was a red-headed young man with a shaved undercut and a Van Dyke beard. His hands were gentle as he shifted her nose back into place, washed the blood off, taped it up and handed her ice.

Alex read his name tag. "Dr. Wilson? Where did you get your hair cut?"

The man grinned.

//

On Wednesday morning, she stepped into the training room wearing a short pixie cut and two black eyes. Vasquez made no comment. She simply handed her four books and said, "Learn these. There will be a test on Friday. We'll resume combat training when Dr. Wilson clears you for it. Make use of your down time."

Alex looked at the titles and grinned. She had her father's annotated copies of these very books in her locker in the women's barracks. "Yes, Ma'am!" she said.

Vasquez just grunted in reply.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am picturing Alex's new haircut like the one she had in Taxi Brooklyn,


	3. Chapter 3

J'onn sat in his office looking at the budget for the fourth time and giving up. He had been a bureaucrat for a long time, but some of it simply never got easier.

The knock came a minute before the appointment. "Come."

Vasquez entered with a folder. "Sir, I have the preliminaries for Danvers."

"Sit."

"She scored off the charts on strategy and logistics. Her knowledge of ground tactical suggests to me that she probably memorized von Clausewitz and Sun Tzu. Her air and sea will need work. She can sail and surf, so she understands tides and wind, but knows nothing about flying. I gave her a D for hand-to-hand, but she's resilient and unafraid and pain doesn't stop her."

"About that. Was that really necessary?"

"I believe so, sir. However..."

"Speak."

"I was looking at her medical records with Wilson. She seems to have sustained several broken bones in her teenage years. Sir, do we think she suffered abuse?"

"The situation was complicated but I do not believe abuse was part of the scenario."

"Yes, sir. If she's as smart as you say she is, she might make an excellent tactical officer. As for fieldwork... That remains to be seen."

"Noted."

She heard the nuance in his voice. "You disagree, sir?"

"Let's just say that I think Alex Danvers may surprise you."


	4. Disappointment

Alex called at eleven sharp on the following Sunday morning.

"Alex, sweetie," said Eliza. "How is the new job?"

"It's a little tough. The learning curve on some things is steep."

"But surely the lab work should be a breeze for you--"

"No, it is. That part is. There's just... other things. Like the computer systems they use aren't standard issue and they're not intuitive."

"I'm sure if you just apply yourself--"

"I'm applying, Mom."

"I still don't understand why you would want to take a leave of absence when you are so close to getting your degrees."

"The PI is one of the top bioengineers in his field."

"I've never heard of him--"

"He was working for the government until recently, when he didn't like how the army was planning to use it, so he quit."

"Huh. I'm surprised they let him. Well, just be careful, honey."

"I will. Have you heard from Kara? My signal isn't great out here. Usually she would have called by now, but maybe I missed it..."

"I'm sure she's just busy with her studies. You were like that in undergrad too."

"How's your work going, Mom?"

"Oh, you know, the biomarker has been elusive, but I went to that conference in Metropolis last week and I have some new ideas."

"That's great, Mom. Oh, hey, I have a text from my boss. Gotta go!"

And Eliza knew that experiments ran 24/7, so she just told Alex to take care of herself.


	5. Displacement

Vasquez prowled the DEO, feeling oddly unmoored. She had sporadically worked on the Fort Rozz scenario reports during the night shift, but she just couldn't go home. Her apartment's air conditioning wasn't very good, so she often slept at the DEO during a day after she'd pulled a night shift. But even in the cool of the women's barracks, she couldn't get her Habitrail brain to stop working.

But a niggling suspicion was itching its way up to the surface that it wasn't her brain that was the problem. So she went down to the training room, absently taping her hands, and was about to enter when she heard the heavy thumps that told her someone large was terrorizing the big bag. Vasquez's face split into a wide grin. It had to be Agent Fernandez, one of her favorite sparring partners. She pushed the door open an inch, hoping to jump him from behind and go all Cato on his sorry ass.

But the figure she saw was not Fernandez, but Danvers on her day off, decidedly not resting. The black eyes had mostly faded and sweat gleamed off her muscles. Vasquez hesitated but then Danvers spun around and caught Vasquez staring at her.

Vasquez kept her face neutral. "Good form," she said evenly.

"Thanks. Ma'am."

Vasquez nodded. "So what personal trauma has you murdering the bag on your day off?"

"Weekly call home to my mother, Ma'am."

Vasquez had said it jokingly and hadn't expected a serious answer. "Families are complicated," she hedged.

"Yours too? Ma'am."

"Better than some. Dad was cool with my joining the Marines. Mom, not so much. What about you? MD/PhD. She must be proud of that."

"Pfft. Ma'am. And now she thinks I'm doing a glorified internship with a scientist she's never heard of and that I'll never get those degrees."

"You'll prove her wrong."

"Or right. Ma'am."

"Are you a quitter, Danvers?"

"No, Ma'am. But sometimes I sabotage myself."

"Well, don't, Danvers. We have a grave need for an agent with your skillset. And those degrees are a part of that skillset."

"Yes, Ma'am."

Big brown puppy dog eyes, thought Vasquez, tearing the tape off her hands.

"Did you want to use the bag? Ma'am?"

"No, I, I just remembered something I have to do. Carry on, Danvers."

"Yes, Ma'am."

And Vasquez hurried to the women's barracks to change into something less uniform. It was only an hour drive to Reno and the ironically named Oyster Bay wasn't as posh as Sappho's Cave in Metropolis, but it would have to do. Surely she could find someone looking for some company. Someone who was decidedly not in her chain of command.


	6. Collateral Damage

Major Lucy Lane returned from her leave in Metropolis to find out that while she had been gone, her boss had recruited her boyfriend's best friend's cousin's foster sister--or, if you preferred, her sister's boyfriend's cousin's foster sister--to be trained at her training facility, rather than the one in South Carolina where most recruits got sent.

And she knew that more alien refugees and other illegal immigrants were coming to Earth from desert planets. But still. A heads-up would have been nice.

What was worse was that the woman was breaking all the records of previous recruits--not just the women's records, but the men's as well. The marksmanship was no surprise. Her father had taught her to shoot, field strip, clean and rebuild several different guns from a young age. And her innovations in the lab sounded like a mix of nature and nurture: scientist parents and Stanford. That left strategy and logistics, which was simple systems thinking, and interrogation/resisting interrogation, which was psychology, intuition and mental toughness. Apparently Alex Danvers had all these things in spades.

But now Vasquez had requested that Lucy teach Danvers the rules of engagement, the legal side of alien law enforcement in an area, much like human terrorism, where the laws were either wholly absent or impossible to enforce. That part required a quick mind and sound judgment. It was not enough to be strong or able and willing to shoot straight. Sometimes it was about pulling back in strategic retreat. And it turned out that this was something that did not come naturally to Alex Danvers.

Lucy and Vasquez sat in Lucy's office looking over Danvers' thickening file and Vasquez looked exhausted.

"We just sent through the computer-simulated wargames," said Vasquez, as if explanation. "They took twice as long as usual, so we were up all night."

"Her scores look good."

"Oh, sure. She saves the squad and gets the mission accomplished, but always by sacrificing herself. It's like she comes up with a single solution and goes with it, without considering other solutions with less dire consequences."

"Like she values other people's lives more highly than her own? Hm, well, that's better than the reverse." She thought of Lois, selfish, reckless Lois.

"Not by much."

"Does she have anybody in her life? I thought she was devoted to her little sister."

"Mm. Adoptive. From what I can make of Hank's notes, she might be on the autistic spectrum."

Lucy frowned. "I had... never heard that. And you just know that Lois would have spread that around."

"Not if she thought it would make Clark look bad."

"What about her mother? I know Clark considers her a brilliant scientist."

"She probably is. That doesn't necessarily make her the best mother, though..."

Lucy thought about her brilliant and perpetually disappointed father, how she had coped by turning discipline in on herself while Lois had turned it outward, a blazing fire that burned everything in her wake, except for Clark, who was apparently not, flammable, as least so far. "So what do you want from me?"

"She starts chopper training with Ernie this week I want you to drill her in air tactics."

"Me? Shouldn't you get an airman like--"

"No, I, well, Lucy, I'm sorry. But you were on the ground during the Battle of New York and you saw what damage on the ground a sacrifice in the air makes. I want Alex to start thinking in terms of zero collateral damage."

"But that's--"

"Impossible to achieve. I know. But it's not impossible to think about, and right now, she doesn't even consider it. Change the mental model, change the outcome."

"You know what you are asking."

"I do. And I'm in charge of her desert warfare and IED training. We all have our own scars, Lane."

And Lucy was grateful that at least her own scars weren't physical, like Vasquez's were. And she wondered about the kinds of scars Alex Danvers bore.


	7. Deduction

Alex had always loved flying, from the first time her alien little sister had flown her over the beach at night. The wind whipped through her hair and it was possible to imagine that the stars did as well. The helicopter was a little like that and a little like sailing--managing forward, sideways and up and down movements--pitch and yaw, she corrected herself. And it was a bit like surfing in the way her instinctive balance told her how to go against the fluid mechanics of the air, which were not so different from the fluid mechanics of water.

Her teacher, Ernie, was a second-generation chopper pilot. His father had flown in Vietnam and then commercially, but Ernie started out with the Army, then flew for SHIELD and now was DEO through and through. And he was an excellent teacher, detail-oriented to an extreme, patient, and passionate about flying.

The lessons with Major Lane were... less exhilarating. Alex had met Lois once or twice, and her sister couldn't have been less like the reporter. Well, Alex could understand that. And whereas Lois apparently had a "reckless disregard for rules" (according to Eliza), from what Alex could tell, Lucy had never met a rule she didn't like.

But whereas Eliza had inspired annoyance in Alex at the seeming randomness of most rules, Lucy showed her what they were for: completing the mission while protecting civilians, and bringing ALL of her team home with her.

The pictures of the devastation on the ground in New York after the invasion by the Chitauri and the equally destructive defense of the city by the Avengers gave her pause. In a chess game or a computer simulation, you could sacrifice a single piece or a unit and not face any unintended collateral damage. What Lucy was showing her was that there was always collateral damage.

And she had implied...

Well, she hadn't actually said it directly, but it had sounded like Lucy had once had to sacrifice an underling to keep herself alive long enough to get the rest of the team home.

Alex hated sacrificing pawns in chess. She had always felt, growing up, that she and her sister were pawns in a much larger game played by Superman and her parents. It had never occurred to her that sometimes the people who sacrificed pawns might actually lose sleep over it.

She would have bet that Major Lane lost sleep over it. And that was the kind of person she could learn from and follow and emulate.

And so she did. She was nine months into her training when a pair of aliens were seen in National City trying to steal a rare meteorite from the Science Museum. On the surveillance video, their images were blurry but just recognizable to the DEO's database as being a species from a planet with a green sun, who could alter their appearance at will, usually to mimic the beings around them. Alex read all of Vasquez's notes, reports and scenarios that included mention of the species, and then peppered her with questions.

"So this can't be cloning, right? Because they never get close enough to their victims to get a DNA sample, right? Er, Ma'am."

"No, but they got close enough so that our agents could identify a strange scent coming off of them, like creosote. But only briefly."

"Okay, so what if they could be smelled, could they smell our agents? Ma'am. Maybe they're reproducing or synthesizing pheromones that mimic the smell of their victims?"

"Go on."

"Well, Ma'am, the smell and memory centers of the brain are right next to each other. If the scent were strong enough... maybe a hallucination? But that wouldn't fool surveillance cameras, so the museum guards saw themselves but we can recognize the species from the footage."

"So our options are... ?"

"Um, eating jalapenos so we can't smell anything? Ma'am."

Vasquez laughed. "You fit in here, Danvers. Nice low-tech out of the box thinking."

But of course it hadn't been that easy.

By the time they located the aliens, hiding at the electrical utility, they had already set up the device that would electrify the meteor and serve as the core of something: an energy device? a weapon?

Vasquez had led one team inside, leaving Major Lane to set up a perimeter and she told Alex to wait outside. "You're not cleared for mission action. Driving only."

"Yes, Ma'am."

And Alex had sat there, watching the Major's agents move out to surround the facility with its warning signs about dangerous voltage, and she tried to think how taking on your enemies' faces could serve you. Sure, it could get you close enough to get at their food maybe, and confuse them long enough to get away unscathed, but compared to other evolutionary adaptations--the armadillo's armor or the mosquito's stinger--it seemed like a lot of work for little guaranteed payoff. And nature was lazy and natural selection was efficient. It just didn't add up, especially because Vasquez's notes said that they had bad eyesight, which meant that their lookalikes would not, well, look exactly like the originals.

Explosions rang out, and weapons fired. Lucy and a pair of her agents went in. More shots, then voices yelling, "Clear!"

The soldiers brought out... bodies. Alex's heart plummeted. It was Vasquez. Unconscious. Dead?

And then a second Vasquez and then a third. Alex jumped out of the truck and ran over to look at the three bodies lying, open-eyed and stunned, or worse.

Lucy was saying to a lieutenant, "But we don't know which is her and which is them so they all end up in the brig until we sort it out."

"Um, Ma'am? Major Lane?"

"Danvers." Lucy frowned.

"The one on the far left is Agent Vasquez."

Lane's eyes flickered over the identical bodies. "Be that as it may. My orders stand. Danvers, back in the truck."

And Alex drove them back to the bunkers, fuming, but she'd learned to keep her mouth shut.


	8. Assessment

Director Henshaw read the report that Vasquez had given him, including his own assessment when they came in that Danvers was probably right. He signed off on a light punishment for Danvers for disobeying orders and a short paragraph on Danvers' powers of observation to go into her file. He called Danvers into his office and explained these two decisions. She showed no emotion one way or another.

"So, Danvers, tell me. How did you guess that the last Vasquez was the real one?"

"Sir, they got frozen with their eyes open. Agent Vasquez has a few grey hairs and some sort of orange flecks in her brown eyes. The other two didn't. They tend to be near-sighted as a species, sir, and don't see high-level details like that."

"I see. But you do notice the exact details of your Supervising Officer's eyes?"

"Yes, sir. We've been sparring and grappling every day for nine months. I look her in the eye all the time."

"I see," said Henshaw. "You may go, Danvers."

And he did see, more than anyone else, much more than anyone else suspected, but for the time being, he would keep these things to himself and see how it all played out. They were in no hurry after all. It wasn't like the world was ending.

Well, not this world, anyway.

 

FINIS


End file.
